House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) said today that if Republicans can’t reach a deal with President Barack Obama to avert the fiscal cliff, his “plan B” is to have the House vote on a bill to allow tax rates to go up only for families earning more than $1 million. Sure, it’s a negotiating and public relations gambit. And yes, the White House, Democrats and even some of his own Conservative members immediately trash-talked this back-up plan. But in asserting that millionaires should be taxed differently than the almost rich, Boehner at least has history on his side.

During the first 60 years of the nearly 100-year-old income tax, the top marginal tax rate was never imposed on couples earning less than $1 million in 2011 dollars, calculations by the Tax Foundation show. The original top rate of 7% in 1913 applied only to income over $500,000---more than $11 million in today’s dollars. Most famously, points out historian Joseph J. Thorndike, Franklin Roosevelt pushed through a top marginal rate on income over $5 million (more than $80 million today) ---a cut-off so high that it applied to just one taxpayer. “They had plenty of (rich) people to hate. They didn’t need to pick on John D. Rockefeller all by himself," says Thorndike, whose book, Their Fair Share: Taxing the Rich in the Age of FDR, is due out next month.

Boehner has some strange contemporary bedfellows too; plenty of liberals think millionaires, to say nothing of the 400 richest Americans, should be taxed differently than those getting by on just $250,000 or $500,000 a year (which is still five to ten times the median family income). New York imposes its top state income tax rate of 8.82% only on income above $2 million. California voters last month approved a referendum backed by Democratic Governor Jerry Brown that raised the state’s state top income marginal rate to 13.3% on income in excess of $1 million.

In a recent New York Times op-ed, billionaire Berkshire Hathaway Chairman Warren Buffett called for a special 30% minimum tax on income between $1 million and $10 million, and a 35% minimum tax on income above $10 million. (In that piece he wrote, “I support President Obama’s proposal to eliminate the Bush tax cuts for high-income taxpayers. However, I prefer a cutoff point somewhat above $250,000 — maybe $500,000 or so.” ) Obama himself has embraced the idea of a minimum "Buffett Rule" tax for millionaires---although as introduced by Senate Democrats, it phased in between $1 million and $2 million.

In fact, it wasn’t until the 1970s, when Congress happily allowed taxes to rise through “bracket creep” that the top marginal rate was imposed on incomes of less than $1 million in today’s dollars. From 1965 through 1976, the top 70% rate applied to taxable income above $200,000 per couple. Translated to 2011 dollars, a $1.4 million income cutoff in 1965 was allowed to fall below $800,000 by 1976. In subsequent years, Congress made some small inflation adjustments, but the effective income level for the 70% rate continued to slide, to a low of $531,698 (in 2011 dollars) in 1981. After that, President Ronald Reagan’s first big tax cut kicked in.

Boehner has history on his side in another way too. The last two times rates went up, so too did the cut-off for those top rates. Reagan’s Tax Reform Act of 1986 slashed the top rate from 50% to 28%, while reducing the income cut-off for the top bracket from $175,250 to $29,750--a figure that was then adjusted for inflation going forward. When President George H.W. Bush signed into law an increase in the top rate to 31%, the cut off for the top rate was raised from $32,450 per couple to $82,150. And when President Bill Clinton signed the 1993 law creating two new, higher rates, the income cut-offs for the top rates were set higher still---a 36% rate was imposed on income above $140,000 per couple and a 39.6% rate above $250,000. Those cut-offs didn’t change, however, when the Bush tax cuts reduced the 39.6% rate to 35% and the 36% rate to 33%. With automatic adjustments for inflation, in 2012 the 33% rate kicks in at $217,450 in taxable income per couple and the 35% rate at $388,350. In Obama’s latest reported offer to Republicans, rates would only rise for those with income over $400,000---in other words, about where the top rate begins today.